RE: concatenating web services

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Rand Anderson [mailto:randerson@macgregor.ws]
> Sent: Monday, February 10, 2003 8:03 AM
> To: Don Box
> Cc: xml-dist-app@w3.org
> 
> 
> Hi Don,
> Thanks for commenting on this.
> 
> My question, or I guess it was more than a question, it was a
suggestion,
> was that the intermediaries can do more than blindly pass the message
on.

Yes they can. This is by design.

> That certainly has value by itself (e.g., for mixing transports along
the
> way), but allowing the intermediaries to do something 'interesting' to
the
> message contents along the way holds the power of enabling a
decentralized
> form of simple orchestration, a pipelining. And it parallels many
real-
> world
> semantics of process flow.

Absolutely. That stated, SOAP doesn't draw a hard line on when that
message being sent from A->B->C->D->E->F->G becomes two (or more)
distinct messages and when it is just a single message along a long-ish
message path.

My favorite example in this space is whether or not the "server" in a
request/reply scenario is just an intermediary that does some work as
the client sends the request message to itself.

> Of course, I was just exploring what seemed to be some interesting
ground
> here...Are you saying that WS-Routing should not be used for this
(i.e.,
> counts as 'twisted' ;)?

Not at all. We designed WS-Routing to help generalize some of the
plumbing for these scenarios (and others). 
 
> If so, do you have something fundamental against the concept of
pipelining
> services? 

No way! Smart intermediaries are goodness.

Received on Monday, 10 February 2003 18:42:12 UTC